To kick it off, here’s a guiding quote attributed to the Armenian Mystic-Philosopher-Composer, G.I. Gurdjieff:
Behind personality is essence.
Behind essence is Real I.
Behind Real I is God.
The rest will explore what it means to slowly gravitate from personality to essence, to the Real I, to God.
And I’d love to hear your thoughts or questions after reading!
The Tale of Two Selves
We are “mixed” creatures
Humans appear to be a mix of two worlds:
Body + spiritEgo + essenceAnimal + “angel”Form + formlessness
As “serious” spiritual seekers, we tend to have a preference for the words on the right and downplay the words on the left.
We seem not to love our messy “human” parts and prefer being “spiritual” instead.
If I’m so “spiritual” or enlightened or “one with God”, then why do I feel down and depressed? Why do I keep doing that? Why do I habitually have these thoughts? Perhaps getting “more” spiritual will help.
Yikes.
But nondual wisdom traditions remind us that these apparent dualisms are exactly that: apparently dual. We are secretly not two. We are one.
So how might we navigate this apparent dualism of self?
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"Self 1": Thinking-Feeling-Doing x10
Most of us, including myself, are caught up in our form-filled, animal-body egos.
This egoic identity is what I refer to as our thinking-feeling-doing self.
The self that we all know is always thinking, feeling, and doing.
thinking-feeling-doing, thinking-feeling-doing.
All
day
Loonnnnngggggggg
On the Enneagram, this is symbolized as a Triangle.
Body, Mind, and Heart.
(We’ll get to the Circle surrounding the triangle next week!)
The mind thinks. The heart feels. The body moves.
Thinking. Feeling. Doing. Often unconsciously.
This is our personality
Our everyday “self.”
Our ordinary awareness, as Thomas Keating would call it.
It is what Eckhart Tolle calls our ego, our unobserved mind.
And it is exhausting.
We feel ourselves to be
Bodies deeply in need of rest from activity.Minds seeking space between busy thoughts.Hearts hoping to be less jerked around by emotions.
And we do deserve some rest from this self!
(Spoiler alert! There is a way to get some “rest” from this self. Thomas Keating humorously called time spent in Centering Prayer “taking a vacation from yourself.” And I know I could use a vacation from this self. Every day!
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When we think, feel, and act on autopilot, we often feel out of control.
We feel claustrophobic, and
Return to old beliefs about ourselves (mind)Fall into old behavioral patterns (body)Get stuck in the same emotional whirlpool (heart)
Here’s a metaphor about this stuckness.
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Metaphor: You are a Mansion
In one of my favorite books, The Wisdom of the Enneagram, authors Russ Hudson and Don Riso write:
“When we identify with the personality, we are settling on being much less than who we really are.”
They continue with this powerful metaphor:
“It is as though we were given a mansion to live in, with rich furnishings and beautifully kept grounds, but have confined ourselves to a small dark closet in the basement.Most of us have even forgotten that the rest of the mansion exists, or that we are really its owner.”
This metaphor names the issue clearly:
When we are stuck in habitual, automatic thinking, feeling, and doing patterns, we are like someone locked in a basement, with a few dark rooms to wander through, but unable to access the higher floors or see the light of day.
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Luckily, the thinking-feeling-doing-self is not our only “self.”
There is also the formless self: our being-self: our deeper I am.
"Self 2"
The I am that is
before I am this, I am that
Beneath the busyness of our mind, body, and heart is something much larger, freer, and far more spacious.
They are the “rooms in our mansion” that we rarely explore when we’re stuck in the basement.
Beneath the busy body is being. Our simple I am. Our own naked presence.
It is always there, as the background of experience.
It is your felt sense of I am.
I am.
Not, I am happy.
Not, I am sad.
Not, I am a Christian, an atheist, a Republican, a progressive, etc.
I am.
Naked I am.
It is the I am that is beneath and before I am this, I am that.
I am that which is grounded in the Great I AM of God’s Infinite I AM-ing.
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But how can we contact this naked I am?
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This is where the gift of meditation or Centering Prayer comes in.
The Purpose of Meditation
Meditation is not about completely stopping our thinking-feeling-doing-self (good luck with that!!)
Rather, meditation practices like Centering Prayer invite us to dis-identify from the thinking, feeling, doing self.
We learn to “let go” of the busyness of our I am this, I am that, thinking-feeling-doing-self. And ultimately, resting in the greater spaciousness that we are.
As depicted on Thomas Keating’s “Levels of Awareness” chart, meditation enables us to transcend the “ordinary awareness” and enter our spiritual awareness.
It takes us deeper into our being, beneath the busy body, mind, and heart.
With practice, we learn to rest in our true self, and operate out of our true self in everyday life.
We learn to rest in the Divine Indwelling, God’s simple, naked Being within us, the Ground in which our being is rooted.
God’s I AM in which our personal I am is rooted.
And here, in this practice of “letting go”, we reprogram our nervous system to be far freer in our day-to-day lives, exploring the upper rooms of our “mansion” because we are no longer trapped in the basement of our ordinary self.
